Lessons

Lesson Info

Bristle Brushes

So far, the brushes we've been using the only way to take advantage of a tablet it's like control its size or to control its opacity like how much you can see through it but in essence it still really kind of dumb brush where it's just a shape being repeated over and over again we don't have to end up using just that kind of a brush if I just in this case go to my normal paintbrush tool and I come up here to my brushes, some of the brush is if you look closely at them don't look like two simple shapes like circles or leaves or anything else, but they actually look like they have bristles and a newer version of feather shop we have bristle brushes, so if I grab a bristle brush then it's actually thought of as a three dimensional brush and if you go to the bottom of this brushes panel there's actually an icon there's three at the bottom the one on the far left if I click on it well, give me a three dimensional view of that brush and if you look at it it's changing based on the pen that I...

'm holding, so if I hold the pen near straight up and down on the tablet you see the orientation of the brush and if I tilt it it is aware of that kind of tilting and moving around at various angles on this, you see that so we can get quite different looks with this based on what kind of brush we choose, and so if you look close again at thes, they're just like normal brushes. You can buy the art supply store, you can get one that's got more of it comes down to a tip so that we come down close to the canvas, the paint you're going to get a very small tip to begin with because you get the tip. And if you push hard with your tablet it's going to push it down enough into the paper that those bristles should start spreading out, giving you a wider paint stroke, or even start off with one that is wider or start off with one that's fanned or at an angle. And if it was at an angle that depend on the angle that your hold in japan as to what kind of shape you get out of it. So we have all those kinds. We also have airbrush is down here and a little pencil icon. So with those let's look at how the settings change, because if I have a brush like one of these now down here, instead of having simple settings like spacing and what was in there before rotation or something, we got new stuff. So first watch the preview up here when I change things that'll give you a better sense for how it's controlling the brush there is a length controlled you see that's controlling how long the bristles are in so with that if I end up, you know, painting a little bit here I happen to have a brush that has texture in it, but I can paint a little bit or if I play harder, you see how it's filling in the texture more in that reflects that little three dimensional view of my brush what's happening with this there is a stiffness control, so if you have a stiff brush it's more like darn near a wire, brush it out where you're doing this and if I bring down the stiffness that's going to end up changing my brush considerably when I actually hit the surface, you see the little three d view so that I come down a little bit come not even push harder and you see distorting the actual of bristles that make up the brush before I had the stiffness turned up quite high, which made a brush that doesn't quite flesh flexes much when it hits the surface. We also have the number of bristles in the brush, which is the bristles setting here and if I bring it down, we're gonna have one where like somebody pulled out all the bristles and now when I paint, I'm just going to get little hints of it compared to if I have a lot of bristles in there, then it's going to be filled in aa lot, mohr because we got a lot more in that brush, so you get the sense for what the bristles do. So if I look down the preview at the bottom down here, I get a sense for the brush stroke should approximately look like, and if I look at the preview in the upper left three one, I get better cents for the actual shape of my brush. This preview in the upper left becomes a little bit of a novelty where it's more of a distraction, because if it's something moving around as you're moving your hand it's like a tv set in the background restaurant or something, I I just can't help but look over there's motion going on, but it's, good to have on when you're first getting used to the brushes and all the settings involved in how they're interacting. Once you get used to its behavior, though, then you can turn that off the way you turn it off is at the bottom of your brushes panel, there are three icons there side by side in the icon of the far left eye's going to toggle the visibility of that and that's only going to show up if you grab one of these brushes that has the bristles if I go back to a normal brush is going to disappear because the normal brushes just a flat kind of a dumb brush you could say we're as these you get a much better sense for their shape when you end up choosing one of these so remember stiffness going to control really? How much this affects it when I come down here if I to a little bit pushed down a lot so it's getting wider holding that it deep angle get a much wider stroke then if I hold it straight up and down you know that type of thing eso with this these air the controls that we have um thickness of our brush to see it filling out as I do that this is really let me show you this by bringing down I'll choose a different kind of brush more this kind all right? And I'm going to make it so we have very few bristles and I'm gonna get rid of my texture. Okay? So now you can see here if I get the number of bristles down far enough so that you barely have any factor is just a few thickness means how thick arthuis individual bristles, so if you look at the preview down at the bottom thickness is really thin ones or we can really build him up sometimes it's hard to tell that when you have a lot of bristles you just notice the brush changes in some way but just so you know thickness is the bristle thickness so bristles his number of brussels total in that brush length is how long those bristles are you'll see that mainly the three d preview thicknesses the actual thickness of individual bushels stiffness is how much is it gonna flex when you hit the surface and actually start pushing down more like a wire brush you could say or is it more like a really soft uh brush with that and uh we still have spacing what you'll notice is when you're using these kinds of brushes is sometimes the performance of your computer starts to lag a bit and you're trying to paint and it's trying to keep up and you're just not getting exactly what you want in on occasion you're gonna have to bump up the spacing a little but it's a two percent right now I might need to bump it up to five or six percent in order to really get my computer to be just a performance to be really good uh in with this you also have different types of tips we can have round blunt curve angle and fan and that's what these icons were trying to show you over here like the fan brush would be the one that is fanned out like this, just the shape of the brush compared to the one that has a tip or his blunt uh, that type of thing, so bristle brushes can be really nice, but if we're still using the normal, uh, painting tool, we've still using a pretty basic tool so there's a different tool in photoshopped that will allow us to do more things and let's see what it is if I click and hold on my normal brush tool, there is one called the mixer brush tool because the normal brush tool doesn't usually interact with what's under it. So if you put down awesome paint with the normal brush tool, uh, you you don't know really what you're going to be getting other than you know, what's underneath it is going to make it so it is, um, I'm trying to say it pretty much ignores what's underneath it, and it just ends up covering up or partially covering up if you have your opacity down, but with this particular brush, it can interact with what's underneath it, and you can control that using this little pop up menu for one, these are just simply presets if you're not used to using the brush, then you could come in here, and if you choose wet anytime you see any reference toe wet very wet or moist it's talking about the surface that you're going to paint on meaning should it think of it as being wet paint that you're about to paint on top of? If it's wet paint that means when your brush hits it and starts to push it, it should start to move, you know so you can influence if on the other hand it's dry paint then uh nothing's gonna move because dry that makes sense and so that's what it's referring to here now let me get in here and first I'm going to get rid of that preview I'm going to choose a brush I might like and then we're just going to start painting and you see that with a bristle brush and with a mixer I can come in here and doesn't this look a lot more like a natural brush to you? Compared to what we were getting? We're using just plain old brushes made out of like a little picture or something I could get this look now that khun spread things around and right now it's acting as if what's underneath is wet and I can push it around my foreground color is still blue, so it's mixing maur blew in with it but we're primarily trying to move around what's already there and the reason for that is this a set toe wet if I make it very wet it's going to be able to simply move it further, going to be able to get way out there where as if it is moist. Uh, then oftentimes you'll find you can't move it quite a sfar, although it's going to really depend on the other settings that we have eso let's see weakened d'oh. Now these are just presets in all these settings to here is change the various choices that are found over here on the right. So if I choose the choice of wet, all it did was type in four numbers, you know, right over in here is simply a preset in those presets air not necessarily engineered exactly the way you might expect them to be in that, um, they don't seem to be artistically created. Instead, they're mathematically created in that if you look at him dry is just putting zero fifty and this is putting in zero five and this is putting in zero, one hundred you're never going to find some in between, like sixty three percent or some other thing where somebody really finessed it. So you could just start from this and then find tune it by moving the various sliders that air there so let's, take a look at what we have here, first off, there are some choices we have wet that is the surface we're going to paint on is it wet so things could move or is it not? If I bring wet all the way down now when I paint on my image it shouldn't be able to move anything that's already there because the surface that I'm painting on is dry so what's there is not something to be moved instead what I'm getting color from is my foreground color ah and that's what I'm painting with load over here is on actually get wet all the way down there ah load is how much pain to my putting on my brush did I dip it in some paint words and they're so much that it's never going to run out and if so I can go over here and build this thing up and it's never going to run out I can sit here and paint for a year and a half and never goingto run out if I turn load down though that means that there's only a certain amount of paint on my brush and if I continue painting and painting eventually I'm gonna run out it's going too slowly fade out although oftentimes will still be a hint of it on the edge of your brush that the outer edges but in general it's going to be end up fading out quite a bit flow is an overall like opacity almost control it's like taking all of these settings and saying let's, mellow him out so my brush isn't able to do one hundred percent of what it usually could, just trying to mellow out what it's doing if I really find them not getting exactly what I expect like it's just not putting out enough painted that kind of thing bring your flow down uh then on ly, if what's underneath is wet on ly, if this has turned up doesn't matter how much will you have the choice called mix in? What mixed means is what mix means is should it mix what's underneath that is wet with what I'm painting with? If I'm painting with green, then shouldn't mix the green that I'm paying with with with which underneath or not so if I bring that mix all the way down, I should come in here and get mainly green. If I bring mixed way up, I should get more of a mix of that green with what's underneath so I get more of the green with the blue. You see how the two are going together? Uh, so wet is if the surface underneath is what mean can that stuff move or not? Load is how much of my foreground color do I have loaded on the brush? In mix is how much of the underneath is going to mix with what's there flow is an overall train up or down kind of control, and by changing this you can get to a general setting for each one of those things but then you'll want to find tune it a couple of the things this is the color your painting with you usually think that that would just be a copy of what's down here you know your foreground color, but it can change you can actually end up paying with more than one color it's a weird thing you could do with this and I'll show you how to do that little bit get two icons after that in this one here is loading your brush and what it means is after leko the mouse button should it dipped my brush and paint or not? If you think about the last time you painted across a real painting let's say if you don't dip your brush in a thing of more paint, then what's on your brush it's whatever was on it at the moment you lifted from the canvas it's based on where you let go of her but if that icon has turned on every time released the mouse button, it should load your brush with whatever color is sitting here if you click on that then it's not gonna load your brush and therefore the only thing that could be on your brush is possibly what was there to begin with but then there's another one next to it and that is for cleaning your brush imagine yet a real campus a real brush and you had I don't know what use because I don't do real painting but it can of paint thinner or whatever you use turpentine or whatever it is you dip your brush in to clean it you know and so if that is turned on then it means when you lift your brush and you stop painting it's automatically dipping it in some uh serpentine or whatever it is that cleans your brush so now my brush has nothing on it if that's turned off so if I have both of these turned on with this means is clean my brush when I lifted and then fill it with pain clean it and then uh what they call loaded but it just means dip it in paint if I turn off the loading part and I leave the cleaning part now it means when I've done painting clean my brush but they don't put anything on it so now if there's nothing on my brush what can I do well if my canvas was wet like this move around what's already there I'm just not going to put any more paint on my brush I'm going to use the paint that's already on the image simic says, now, if you do that, the setting called wet determines how far can you move stuff? How mean is the is the paint on the surface almost dry? And if so, when you paint across that, you can barely move it around or is it really wet where you can move it way over all over the place when you're painting? And so you'll notice that mme or when you don't have a any paint on your brush and you're just moving around the paint that's already there we got wet if you turn both of those off now it means don't cleanly brush, don't dip it in paint and so therefore you're only working with what's already on the campus. But if you're not cleaning your paint, it's going to remember what was on your brush at the moment you lifted it so if I was painting over a blue area the moment I lifted it there's going to be some blue on this brush? If when I lifted it I was on a white area there's going to be a little bit of white left on the brush, so when I come back down it should be putting in some blue, but if what I let go on was white, the next time I came in, you should be put in and white that kind of weird so if it doesn't clean your brush it remembers where you let go here alecko on top of some greenish stuff so that when you come back in you're gonna be putting in some greenish stuff so it means my just like we're normal brush if you never painted it never put any more on it it's just got what was on there when you let go uh all right then if you're going to end up painting usually you can come over here and say you want to load your brush so that when you paint again you should end up with the colors similar to what you've asked for here you tell it how much you'd like to load it and there's a way to paint with more than one color usually only paint with one but if you hold on the option key and you drag across an area it's going to pick up the colors that you dragged across so that up here it no longer shows you a single color instead if I hold on option and I drag it shows you what I just dragged over and it thinks of that is what you're painting with so I can come over here and say I want to pick up this green in a little bit of the blue over there and now when I paint I should get a little bit of green in a little bit of blue hold down option and drag off this blue onto the white I should have both blue and white you see I'm getting both blue and white when I painted option drag get some of this green some of that white see that's what I mean just the very beginning but it really depends on what all your settings air said to if I have the setting called mix turned up a lot mix means how much of the underlying image is going to be mixed in there and if it's up quite high, then you're going to get a little hint to the paint you put in and a lot of what was underneath is going to come in turn mix down though, and it's not gonna be able to mix inasmuch of what was underneath, so it takes a little bit of getting used to this far as slam feeling what you have here and then put it in, but it can be really nice we got lots of little settings for doing so. Also, if you want to manually clean your brush like you want to say just for the next paint stroke, I don't want to leave it where it cleans it every time that type of stuff you can come in here and there's a little don point arrow if you click there, you can say, hey, I want to load my brush or I want to clean my brush and it would clean out what's on it so instead of having it do it automatically each time you let go you could manually do it one at a time you can also then say hey if I have more than one color in there you can say load solid colors only and if you have it set that's actually a setting load sala killers only if that's turned on them when you hold on the option key and click it doesn't matter if you just click or you click and drag you just get one color three that off is what allows you to click and drag to get more than one color so with that there's a bunch of different things weaken dio I'm gonna go and open up a picture and I'm going to change the name of the background just so it's not stuck at the bottom so I could change its opacity that kind of thing and I'm gonna create a new layer on top of it and I'm going to see if I can paint now if I come in here and I start to paint you see my paint coming in and I might need to clean my brush do all sorts of things with these settings but let's try switching around to maybe amora fan brush I might get my bristles a little soft get them to be a little long and oftentimes I want to end up coming in here in putting in some texture we talked about texture before but when you're using a tablet and when you're using bristle brushes things are a little bit different if I go up here and choose texture I'm gonna come up here and choose a texture I'd like to use in my case I might want to use one of the campus textures I think actually the one we have just canvas should be fine and remember we have a bloody mode that determines really how that canvas interacts with your brush but we have a few other things they're really gonna affect it with the tablet and with these natural media brushes one of them is called depth depth means when I paint how much is that paint getting into the canvas if depth has turned up all the way it gets all the way in the deepest recesses of the canvas and so it can fill the whole thing it could become a solid color as I bring depth down it's not allowing it to go all the way into the deepest recesses off the texture that's there I might need to fine tune my settings for the texture so it's actually affecting my brush a little more I could mess with my brightness a little bit get it in there a little better but now you might see the depth if I bring it up too high the paint can easily saturate all the way into the campus you get a solid color as I bring it down less and less eventually I'll get it so that now when I paint, I'm going to end up um coming in here in as I do here I'm using a wet brush it's picking up colors from what's underneath because what's underneath his wet and over here my flow is that a hundred leading into a lot and it's saying mix a bit with what's underneath and so I can come in here start painting in some of this this is not a layer above if I put in the big details this way I get a basic look for each area it's only if I press really hard that I would end up trying teo filling mohr of this texture but painted on uh then I would end up getting a smaller brush to do the details and put in ah little detailed areas if I hide what's underneath, you can see just the paint in the paint should have some texture to it you see the texture within it and so usually I'd end up doing this and multiple passes I would end up coming in and first using a large brush a very expressive brush that moves around quite a bit and just paint over the large surfaces on each area to get it built up then I would end up creating a new layer to put it on top of and that way, if I mess up somewhere what I'm using a smaller brush afterwards, I can come back and delete it with your racer tool, and I'm not gonna wear it absolutely everything I did on previous times that'll be on the layer underneath, so that basic painting like I have here would be on one layer above it. I would have another one where I use a smaller brush, and I go in for the small, small details, and I might end up with a total of about three layers so that I can end up slowly building up the effect and, uh, getting this to work now with this, even when you're done, you need to be careful of one setting and it's called sample all layers sample all layers makes it so this tool can either look at all of my layers and grab information from them that's where it ends up getting my what it's going to smear with that type of thing, or if I turned on or turned off, I would do that when I'm going to be, um, just touching up a layer and want to move things around in that layer so I could come in here and say, don't load my brush too much. Only keep what used to be there. I can say make what's underneath very wet so I can move it around and come in here and now I can just move things around if I skipped an area where it was wasn't filled in enough I get is hey, let's, move this around. If this edge was too crisp like him, just push it up. If it ends up pushing too far, I'll choose undo a few times, bring your wet setting down what means how what is that paint? How movable is it? So then I can come in here unless they press really hard going there and move it a little bit less. And so I find this to be rather interesting as faras the combination of bristles and the combination of the mixer brush, but it takes some time to get used to these settings wet is always talking about a canvas you're painting on is what's already there? Movable or not? Load is how much paint is in your brush mix is how much of the underlying is going to mix in with what's in your brush inflow is an overall control for uh, all these if you're doing too much, you could lower it, this is loading your brush. This is cleaning your brush, and this is just a pre set, which types in some numbers, so if you end up experimenting with your brushes where you really go in and you play with textures and your brush, you play with the size, the shape and everything else there's one problem you're going to encounter, and that is that you're going to be used to working with, um, brush presets, but brush presets on lee, hold what is defined in the brushes panel if you want to also include all the information up here if the brush is wet yeah, if it's mixing with what's underneath and if it's gonna load or clear then instead of using the brushes panel to save your presets, you're going to want to instead come over here to the tool presets in tool presets. If I save them here by clicking on this icon, not on ly, can it save? Not only could it save the settings of my brushes panel, it also saves all the settings that air across here in the options bar and it can even include the color that I'm painting with all the most the time I don't have it include the color. The time I would have it include the color is when I'm saving a preset like for the grass we made remember how the grass used my foreground color and ended up needing to be that green otherwise most the time I've had that turned off and uh that's where I'd end up defining these save as many of those as you want and you don't have to have this panel opened access them for presets you can instead any tool you're in go to the upper left of the op shins bar usually they'll be a copy of the tool that you're working on the icon for it and if you click there this will give you pre sets for it so you don't have to have the dedicated tool presets panel open and just make sure whenever you're in a particular tool if you click in the upper left up there to get to your pre sets turned on the checkbox called current tool on lee otherwise this menu is going to be so full of other stuff because it's going to have it for every single tool him by choosing one of these presets it would switch to the other tool and load its preset and that's just going to be a bit much so turn on current tool on lee and you'll be able to uh just get the presets for that particular tool all right? So with this I'm still kind of getting into this I'm not overly versed on it I would say because to me it's still a new process and I don't need to make paintings every day but I'm really excited about having the possibilities there and looking forward to spending more time with it to really get into it uh but experiment with brushes the options and the mixer brush mixer brushes what offers you all these settings up across the top can you paint on a smart object and if so are they're pros and cons no, you can't paint on a smart object a smart object, his limitation in that you cannot directly change that layer meaning I can't paint retouch or anything else I can always paint on an empty layer above the smart object and if the sample all layers check box has turned on then it khun sample from the smart object but the actual end result would appear on its own layer the layer that tactic so whenever you have a smart object in fact well if you have any smart object and try to paint to retouch uh we're even adjusted it'll just tell you can't do it, so put it on an empty layer above um if you had a photograph under there ben and you're pushing around with wet yeah yeah, no problem should be no problem if you get down here too use wet and let me see if I can do it without mixing in so this is just the photo I'm working directly on the layer that contains that photo and I'll clear out the painting I had I'll just get rid of that layer working on the picture itself come on up here and is long as when you're in the mixer brush you have the wet setting turn on uh then you can come in here and push that around in this particular brush has texture in it so you can see the texture coming in as I push it and if you want it to be a little more difficult to push, bring the wet setting down considerably and then when you push it will be a little bit more difficult to do it and if you happen to have a four round color that you're painting with and you've loaded your brush then thie mix is going to determine how much of that underlying image gets mixed into it so yeah but if I don't love my brush then it's going to be based on whatever it is that's on that campus to begin with cool then question from photo maker our load and flow tightly coupled for instance if you let of rushmore will you get more paint laid down on the initial stroke of a high flow brush the way I think about it is flow is gonna limit everything just back off on everything. So if you're pushing things around too much in all these things, you're too high flow is going to, uh, lesson that so it's going to be a little more difficult? I mean, like, get a little closer to see what's happening, but right now I'm trying to push this and it's just not going quite as much, but as far as I can tell, flo is interacting with all of these as faras flow and load if I bring load up to one hundred, the main thing that means it's, my brush will never run out of whatever it's loaded with, and so I need a loaded though let me get in here and get a solid color, and it should never run out, so but I'm still experimenting with these, so I don't know if I know exactly what, how to think of all of them, but flow is the one that I think of is an overall lessening of the effect, uh, there's a chance that there's something a little bit more to it that I'm not aware of. All right? So anyway, that's some of mixture, brush and the natural media just make sure that when you use it that you experiment with the various brushes, know that if you ever used the airbrush a couple things to think about with the airbrush, one of which is with it. One thing that's. Unnatural you're used to with a tablet. Pushing down means give me more either bigger brush or more opacity, or something with the airbrush that's. Not usually the case, because thie airbrush is thinking about how close are you to the page? So if you press hard, thinks you're close, and if you have an airbrush close to a surface, you get a smaller area and it's when you're far away in your airbrushing that you get larger. So if you ever get into those tried, really varying your pressure to see a big difference.